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Correctional Services says it “works very hard to remove and stop contraband” but OPSEU says those measures are inadequate.

The prison guards union says a successful intelligence-gathering system that intercepted drug smuggling at Toronto West was not carried on at the new Toronto South Detention Centre (pictured). (Rick Madonik / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

They arrive sewn into clothing or tucked into food deliveries. Sometimes they’re thrown over fences or are even attached to fishing line and pulled up through windows.

But illegal drugs are most often smuggled into prisons the old fashioned way: “up the behind.”

Few people are under any illusions that it’s possible to completely stem the tide of drugs entering jails, but Ontario prison guards say the province has become so resigned to the problem it isn’t even interested in funding measures proven be effective.

Last weekend alone, two people died from overdoses in jails in southern Ontario: one at Hamilton Wentworth Detention Centre, the other at the new superjail called Toronto South Detention Centre in south Etobicoke.

“The problem’s been the same and probably gotten worse as regards to drugs being brought in,” said Monte Vieselmeyer, corrections division chair for the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, who has 24 years experience in prisons. “There have been things that we’ve proposed on the union side on how to combat that … and more often than not, the ministry turns its nose up at it.”

While touring U.S. prisons, union officials saw airport-style body scanners used to detect drug smuggling. While the Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services pledged to launch a pilot program late last year, OPSEU says nothing has materialized in the months since.

Guards at the Toronto West Detention Centre in Rexdale had established an intelligence-gathering unit called the Institutional Security Team that mapped out inmate gang affiliations and intercepted drug shipments. The pilot was so effective that it was made permanent.

But a new team has yet to be established since Toronto West inmates were transferred to Toronto South last year.

Vieselmeyer says the scanning chairs, which were brought in more than a decade ago, only detect metal and there are only two dogs available for prison work in the entire province.

While illegal drug use in correctional facilities has become commonplace, it has real consequences: drug-related violence that put inmates and guards in hospital as well as overdoses that can land inmates in the morgue.

The corrections ministry could not provide any statistics on prisoner overdoses or assaults before the Star’s deadline. The Canadian Press, however, obtained numbers last year through a freedom of information request.

According to a report in April, 2014, there were about 3,000 reported prisoner-on-prisoner assaults in 2012-13 — or eight attacks a day — up almost one-third from the 2,300 attacks five years earlier.

The union believes, based on anecdotal evidence, that there are more assaults now than at any other time in memory. The drugs that fuel this violence are in high demand and can fetch up to 30 times their street value once inside a jail.

Inmates entering a facility are strip-searched, but cavity searches aren’t performed in Ontario, and word it out that a person can conceal drugs worth tens of thousands of dollars inside his body.

Catherine Latimer, executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada, liken the violence and drugs to the chicken and the egg.

“As conditions in prisons worsen, drug use goes up,” she said. “They would do well to work a little on demand reduction.”

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